Ever wonder what the skull of somebody who's had a 13-pound, 3 1/2-foot long spike blown through his head might look like? Find out at this Harvard museum, which has said skull. It's just one of 13,000 medical curios the museum has collected since the early 1800's.

]]>Harvardadamg2004-12-19T10:49:17-05:00The Plywood Palacehttp://www.boston-online.com/bizarro/the_plywood_palace.html
Clarendon Street and St. James Place, Back Bay

The John Hancock Building is Boston's tallest, at 60 stories. Today, it's a sleek, glass rhomboid. But it was briefly the world's tallest plywood builing. Shortly after its construction in 1975, its windows began falling out. This posed something of a problem given that that building was all glass - and each window weighed 500 pounds. Until they could figure out the problem, engineers replaced all the windows with plywood.

In 1988, Paul Tavilla of Arlington got into the Guinness Book of World Records by using his mouth to catch a grape tossed off the top of the Hancock.

Everybody knows Boston is the Hub of the Universe. Few people, however, know that the exact center of the Universe is located just outside the entrance to Filene's and Filene's Basement. Walk about 15 feet away from the Washington Street entrance, then look down to your left. Underneath what now appears to be a storage area, you'll see part of the plaque commemorating the location - lord only knows why Filene's felt compelled to cover it up.

These are a bunch of mainly 50-something guys who run into Dorchester Bay every New Year's Day clad only in tiny bathing suits. You can find them at the L Street Bathhouse, built by the immortal James Michael Curley.

Basically a one-note joke, but a very funny one. Located in the basement of an old theater in Dedham Center, it consists of spectacularly bad paintings, all leading to the men's room. A couple blocks down High Street is the Norfolk County Courthouse, where Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to death.

MIT students used to have a problem. Returning home from a night of carousing in Boston via the Harvard Bridge (which doesn't go to Harvard), they found it hard to tell far away they were from the MIT campus whenever the fog descended on the Charles River basin.

In 1958, the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity solved the problem by marking off the Harvard Bridge with one Oliver Smoot, a pledge. They picked him up, marked off another Smoot, and continued until done - learning in the process that the bridge was exactly 364.4 smoots and an ear. Today, the bridge is annually re-marked every 10 smoots.

The steak tips here are to die for. On Nov. 6, 1995, four alleged goodfellas were killed (and one was injured) while getting ready for a huge mid-day meal of steak tips. "There was so much beef spread out in front of the five victims that their table-top resembled a cattle drive,'' Mike Barnicle of the Globe wrote at the time.

A five-foot long carved wooden codfish hangs over the entrance to the House of Representatives chamber in the State House. More than just a reminder of the state's seafaring past, the Sacred Cod is an essential part of lawmaking in Massachusetts - and not just because it is pointed toward the party in power.

In 1933, some pranksters from the Harvard Lampoon "codnapped" the fish. For four days, the State House was thrown into turmoil as anxious reps milled about, refusing to conduct any business until the fish was returned. Finally, a tipster told police where to find the fish, and the lawmaking resumed.

Look for the statue of the "Good Samaritan" metaphorically (and melodramatically) comforting the afflicted with some ether. In hero-mad Boston, the first question that comes to mind is why doesn't the statue show William Morton, the dentist who first used the stuff (in an 1846 operation at Massachusetts General)? At the time sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward (now there's a Boston name to reckon with) began working on the statue, it wasn't clear Morton was the true inventor - another doctor had called dibs. Hence the symbolic discovery, which prompted Oliver Wendell Holmes, Boston's 19th-century quipster (he dubbed Boston the Hub), to call the statue a "monument to ether - or either."

The Mass. General Ether Dome, where Morton applied the gas, is still around and open for public viewing (when it's not used for lectures) - and features (for no apparent reason) a mummy and a skeleton.

Uncle Ho figures more prominently in the history of the Boston Gas Keyspan tank in Dorchester. The tank is covered in a giant rainbow design (the largest copyrighted piece of work in the country) by artist Corita Kent. As you drive by, look at the left side of the blue stripe. A face begins to emerge. It's Ho Chi Minh! Keyspan has always claimed it's a coincidence; some suspect Kent, an anti-war activist, included Ho in her 1971 opus as a subtle protest (Kent herself isn't talking; she's dead). Note: There used to be two tanks there. In 1992, Keyspan tore down the Kent tank and hired painters (including at least one Vietnamese refugee) to repaint the mural on the other one. One of the things they did was to give the profile a more rounded, less Ho-ish nose; the company claims this was truer to Kent's original design.

]]>Historyadamg2004-12-17T22:24:51-05:00You say you want a revolution?http://www.boston-online.com/bizarro/you_say_you_want_a_revolution.html
Parker House Hotel, 60 School St. at Tremont

Forget Faneuil Hall or Old North Church. They're ancient history. Modern revolutionaries work at the Parker House. Ho Chi Minh was a busboy; Malcolm X a waiter. Oh, and John Wilkes Booth stayed here a week before he shot Lincoln (his brother, Edwin, a well known Shakespearean actor, was in town to do a play).

The Commonwealth Avenue mall, a linear park down the middle of Comm. Ave. in the Back Bay, features statues of several prominent Bostonians - and Leif Erikson.

Eben Horsford, a 19th-century Harvard professor who discovered baking powder, was convinced that Vikings had sailed up the Charles to found Vinland - the lost Viking colony on the North American mainland. Horsford even claimed to have found evidence of Viking buildings in Cambridge and Watertown. So he commissioned a statue to commemorate the landing spot - and a tower in Weston that provides some of the proof: that area of the Charles is known as "Norumbega," which is obviously an Indian corruption of "Norway." At least, that's what he insisted.

In 1960, Timothy Leary came to Harvard to teach psychotherapy. Not long after, he began his experiments with psilocybin and LSD (bonus fun fact: Among his early test participants: inmates at MCI-Concord, who took psilocybin under his watch).

His office was in the Dept. of Social Relation's Center for Personality Research in Morton Prince Hall, a house built in the 1840s and named for a professor of abnormal psychology at Harvard Medical School. Now, when Leary was at Harvard, the house was located at 5 Divinity Ave., behind the Busch-Reisenger Museum. In 1977, however, the college moved the building to its present location to make way for a new biochemistry building. Today's it's home to the freshman dean.